Saudi Aramco scientists achieve new world record

The EXPEC Advanced Research Center (EXPEC ARC) TeraPOWERS Technology Team, under the leadership of Saudi Aramco fellow Ali Dogru, achieved a major breakthrough with the industry’s first trillion cell reservoir simulation run on Oct. 28.

Saudi Aramco’s cornerstone technology, the parallel oil, gas and water enhanced reservoir simulator (POWERS deployed 2000) has taken its next evolutionary step from mega-cell to giga-cell (GigaPOWERS achieved in 2010) and now to tera-cell (TeraPOWERS of 2016) simulation capability.

“This is the world’s first trillion cell run, as well as a major breakthrough for the global scientific community. Using trillions of cells in a reservoir simulation environment was a long-awaited dream for the global petroleum industry and scientific community,” said  Dogru. “We simulated an oil migration problem in the Kingdom from the source rock to the trap with millions of years of history in 10 hours using 1 trillion active computational cells. This achievement opens the door for us to simulate the Saudi Arabian peninsula in its entirety, as one model, using the reservoir simulation grid. This means that we will be able to examine the peninsula under the microscope for new oil and gas fields.”